Here’s an article about smiles that I thought you might find interesting. It’s about how American’s apparantly use different muscles to smile than Brits do.
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/12/11/americans_smile_brit.html

The technicalities of acting performace are just damned fascinating…glad to see this post!

Two person interaction dialogue animation, the ‘Eye’ post came at a really great time and helped me out a lot.

Brad

oh yes and by the way

“There are three right cranial nerves (III, IV, and VI) involved in innervating the right eye muscles and three left cranial nerves (III, IV, and VI) involved in innervating the left eye muscles”

Stay tuned for more medical facts.

I think the eye focus may have a lot to do with the “dominion” each has as we look at an object. Each gets half of the real space around our face, and then some of the angle.

But if you focus at something looking maybe 2-3 ft out in front and to the side of you, a little below, you can actually tell which eye you’re doing most of the visual information absorption through, just like we favor one eye on a person we’re speaking to.

The -kicker- is that when you switch eyes, there IS a physical shift in both of their orientations.

Obviously I can’t be positive that’s what he’s talking about but it fits the bill. Eyes seem to be the one thing people don’t “get into the character” for, usually favoring some sort of reference, otherwise this might be more obvious (or incorporated to begin with).

As a Videogames animator (30 Fps usually), I’m usually using 1 frame delay to moves the eye darts from on point to the others for most of my characters (realistic or Cartoon) if it “pop” too much, I usually move less the eyes, of if it’s not enough, make the eye darts in 2 frames.

(Sorry for my poor English writing)